Case Number 07170: Small Claims Court

HAMOUN

The Charge

In 1997, Hamoun was voted the best Iranian film ever made by a survey
of Iranian film critics.

The Case

Dariush Mehrjui's 1990 film Hamoun is a rambling, seriocomic journal
of a disintegrating marriage, as seen through the eyes of Hamid Hamoun (Khosro
Shakibai), an upper-middle-class Iranian import-export executive and amateur
philosopher. Hamoun is thrown into a midlife crisis when his wife Mahshid (Bita
Farahi), a successful artist, demands a divorce. (Under Iranian law, a wife
cannot obtain a divorce without the husband's consent.) Hamoun, feeling his
world breaking up beneath his feet, refuses to grant his consent, and embarks
upon a fragmented journey into his past as he struggles to make sense of his
life and figure out where it went wrong. Surreal dream sequences and flashbacks
to happier days are woven into episodic glimpses of Hamoun seeking answers to
his spiritual questions from sources ranging from Kierkegaard to Islam, from a
missing mentor to his family elders.

Hamoun is most effective when Mehrjui applies his influences (most
notably Fellini's 8 1/2) with a lighter touch and allows his characters
to emerge as human beings instead of artistic constructs. Hamoun initially comes
across as something out of a Woody Allen movie, and it isn't until his descent
from neurotic perplexity to full-blown depressive breakdown (at one point he
literally attempts to bury himself) that his philosophical and spiritual quest
feels like something true and sincere, rather than the kind of self-indulgent
navel gazing that typically accompanies films about intellectuals in the throes
of midlife crises. One can't accuse Mehrjui of vanity, however; his largely
self-reflexive protagonist is presented as a self-centered, pretentious jerk, a
brittle and insecure man who resents his wife's artistic success and feels
burdened by her own spiritual searchings. This unsympathetic self-portrayal
doesn't make Hamoun any easier to watch, but it does make for an honest
portrait of the existential confusion of a middle-aged man in modern Iranian
society.

First Run's DVD of Hamoun presents the film in full frame, with a
badly worn print that often looks washed out and murky, especially in the early
scenes. The film isn't helped, either, by burned-in subtitles that unfortunately
render much of the dialogue unreadable whenever the white text appears over a
bright background. Audio, presented in Dolby Digital mono in the original Farsi,
is muddy and hollow-sounding, but acceptable for a film that relies mostly on
dialogue.

Extras are sparse but informative, with a text-based set of notes on the
film by Godfrey Cheshire, a leading scholar of Iranian cinema, as well as a text
biography of director Mehrjui (who directed another popular Iranian film, The
Cow), and a photo gallery. There's also a set of trailers, some for films by
Mehrjui, like 1997's Leila, but also for The Deserted Station by
Abbas Kiarostami, who may be more familiar to Western audiences as the director
of the acclaimed films A Taste of Cherry and The White
Balloon.

For many viewers, Hamoun may be more interesting for its inside view
of Iranian middle-class society than for its story, which follows a predictable
path enlivened only by a rather odd and ambiguous conclusion. Hamoun's frantic
groping for meaning is entertaining enough in its portrayal of spiritual
confusion, but provides less real insight than confessional soul-searching.